Dragon Ball Z: Budokai

"What in holy hell....?"

I’ll be the first to say that I’ve never understood the reason or the draw that Dragon Ball Z has on most people. I can’t understand for the life of me, what is so important, interesting or even remotely intriguing about watching anime characters beat up on each other with over the top moves and bad scripting. To say that I’m walking into this fighting game with a chip on my shoulder would be wrong, but to say that I’m walking into it with no questions would be wrong as well. Though the premise to create a world that you can immerse yourself into is there, the overall execution and use of imagination is lacking sorely in almost every facet that Budokai has to offer.

The story to Budokai attempts to pick up throughout the series at various points in either one of three sagas. You’ll find that the story mode fleshes out the sagas with brief scenes and cuts to attempt to tell the story like you would find it with the animated series. One of the downfalls is that the game attempts to tell the story with the same amount of excitement that the series does, but the brief cuts and the narration of certain key story points is jumbled and confused. For someone who has no clue what the hell the story is, this just makes things twice as hard to understand and in some cases, impossible to comprehend.

Fighting games are supposed to have modes attached to them to make the gamer at home want to play for hours on end and although Budokai has some different modes, you’ll find that there isn’t anything exciting about them. The story mode is where you’ll spend most of your time in the beginning if you want to earn more characters as well as attempt to see what the story is all about, regardless of what character you’re using. Fighting is actually a difficult scenario, because most of the characters have the same moves going for them at all times. The template style combination system doesn’t do much to give you variety, which might be a bummer if you’re looking for more of a challenge with your characters.

The World Tournament is another part of the game where you’ll be able to go up against the computer in order to earn money that can be used to upgrade your fighters. The problem with this mode is that the arenas are extremely small and if you don’t knock your opponent out of the ring, then your opponent will knock you out. Something like this would give a person the thought that strategy is needed in order to win, and it is except that the strategy is to avoid getting hit and then avoid getting knocked out of the ring. Three different skill levels await you and if you can really get into the mode, then there is plenty of money to be made and used for later items.

One of the coolest features is the shopping mode that gives you the ability to upgrade your fighter with several different moves. The problem with this though is that you never know just what it is that you’re buying until you get it, which falls into the roulette syndrome of “your guess is as good as mine”. You might spend hours buying things and while most of them are pretty cool, you’ll find that it is essentially the same move for some other character, only with a different name attached to it. Add this into the fact that the combinations for each of the fighter’s moves so frightening slow, and you might be wondering if this is a demo for a fighting game, or if you’ve got the slow motion button turned on.

Visually Budokai has everything that a Dragon Ball Z fan would be looking for right down to the way that each of the characters is designed and animated on the screen. The fighting moves themselves look to be authentic, but again, you might be stuck in the quandary of figuring out why one fighter’s moves look just like another. The areas that you fight in really don’t have much going for them in the respect of deep detailing, as most of the locations are ripped straight from the anime. While fans of the series will rejoice in seeing their favorite fighters and locations recreated in this manner, other fighting game fans might find this to be a little too simplistic for their tastes.

The music is straight from the anime series as well, with all of the high and low tones that you’ll get in different sequences from the show. Another feature that the audio has to offer is that the game has all of the same voice actors from the show reprising the roles of their cartoon characters throughout the game. The plethora of effects is here as well, but you might find that the over-abundance of sound effects gets a little hard on the ears, especially when you have to listen to Vegita scream like a goof ball every single time he throws out a special move. In all reality, it gets to be a hard ride on the ears and after about half an hour, you might want to turn on the CD player or something else more suitable.

Budokai really doesn’t have much that an average fighting game fan would want in terms of moves, characters, locations and overall battle. There are portions of the game that seemed to be forced and then other ones that aren’t forced enough. Although Budokai has plenty of modes to choose from and plenty of characters, the lack of imagination in the fighting move portion and even the overall fighting really doesn’t do much for me. For Dragon Ball Z fans, this is probably as good as its going to get in the series of DBZ games for a while and you’ll gobble up all the recreated goodness. Anyone else might want to go borrow Scorpions spear and chuck it through Vegita’s head for a more satisfying experience.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/03, Updated 03/17/03